The Speech Acts of Refusing Food… | 73 PARADIGM: Journal of Language and Literary Studies Vol. 4 No. 2, 2021 THE SPEECH ACTS OF REFUSING FOOD ON TELEVISION SERIES “TETANGGA MASA GITU?” Farah Anjanillah Keminggris.id farah.anjanillah@gmail.com Abstract In interpersonal communication, the speaker might use numerous speech acts to convey their intended meaning due to a particular reason. Under the domain of pragmatics, the researcher was attracted to explore the use of speech acts for refusing food. Hence, this study investigates the types of speech acts of refusing food performed by the characters on the TV series entitled “Tetangga Masa Gitu?” and uncovers the aspects underlying the use of speech acts. In terms of approach, this inquiry applied a descriptive qualitative method. In undergoing the analysis, the researcher employed Austin’s (1962), Searle’s (1976), Wijana’s (1996), and Parker’s & Riley’s (2014) notions on the speech acts types. To find out the aspects underlying the speech acts usage, the researcher implemented speech situation aspects and politeness maxims as proposed by Leech (1983) as well as Brown’s and Levinson’s politeness parameters (1987). The data were the utterances indicating speech act to refuse food and the underlying aspects. The data were obtained through “Tetangga Masa Gitu?” TV series. The results exhibit that the characters used direct non-literal and indirect non-literal speech act to refuse food. Meanwhile, the aspects propelling speech acts are politeness, distance, ranking of imposition (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and culture (Leech, 1983). Keywords: speech acts, politeness, utterances, speech situation aspects, pragmatics. INTRODUCTION Referring to Firth, Wijana (1996) explicated that a linguistic analysis should also take into account the situational context when the communication occurs to comprehend the speaker’s meaning. Therefore, Wijana (1996) pointed out that pragmatics refers to a study investigating a language structure externally. Thus, it deals with how a language meaning is integral with context (Wijana, 1996; Genetti, 2014; Parker & Riley, 2014; Rohmadi, 2017). In other words, pragmatics could be conceived as a context-dependent analysis (Genetti, 2014). Pertaining to the concept of language and context in pragmatics, an utterance could be used to deliver an intention or even several intentions through various speech acts